MORGAN: You just can't trust predictions

By TOM MORGAN

Monday

Mar 20, 2017 at 4:00 AM

Uhh, Coach, you are coming off a 0-24 season. On top of your 0-23 season last year. We’d like to hire you to advise us on how to win this season.

Does that make sense? As much as asking the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the cost of the new healthcare plan. Which is what it did for the plan Speaker Ryan introduced recently. The CBO announced that twenty zillion people will die as a result. I may be off by a few zillion.

Meanwhile, the CBO is off. Whenever it predicts anything, it is. Especially anything to do with healthcare.

The CBO predicted dozens of wonderful things for Obamacare which President Obama and Nancy Pelosi used to hype the plan. They were dead wrong. All of them.

So, duhh, we should ask the CBO to predict things about the proposed replacement? We should ask the coach for help? We should ask Al Gore to predict when global warming will exterminate us? (I think he had coastal folks living on rafts by now.)

Wait. A better question. We should take their predictions seriously? Because that is what we do. Our media bleat the CBO predictions as if they are scripture.

Uncle Fred in the nursing home predicts Armageddon every week. Good for him. But do we take him seriously? Do we stock up on frozen pizzas to get us through the worst of it?

The guys who predict hurricanes have called 100 of the last two that hit the Caribbean. And the National Weather Service? It was way off predicting where the snow was going to fall in the latest storm.

Trump should reduce the Weather Service’s budget to $50,000. Enough for one staffer to work from home to pump out forecasts like “Probably, maybe, perhaps snow. From a quarter inch to 8 feet. This week or next. Stock up on pizzas.”

I recommend the same for the CBO. Maybe we could use the same guy. Mornings he could do weather. Afternoons he could make budget predictions.

There is a good reason weather guys screw up. Weather is unpredictable. Or predictable only up to a point. After that you might better ask the dog. Don’t ask the cat. She actually knows, but won’t tell you.

There is a reason why CBO guys screw up. Static projection. That is a fancy term for stubborn. Or rigid. With static projection you predict the storm will drench the folks on the patio. With dynamic projection you figure they will grab their drinks and head inside at first sprinkle.

The proposed healthcare plan would cut regs and fees, which would lower costs for insurance companies. It would allow insurance to be peddled across state lines. It would bring lots more competition to insurance offerings.

Logic says these things should bring prices down. Competition usually does. Lower prices should entice more people to buy insurance. Lower prices usually have that effect. If Delta offers $5 flights to Siberia in January people will go.

CBO guys do not get this. They think people will behave the same way no matter what changes.

This is why they have a 0-24 record predicting how people will respond to tax cuts. Cut the capital gains tax by 25 percent. They predict people will pay 25 percent less to Washington. History says the cuts will bring in more money. Facing a lower tax, people will buy and sell more. Produce more gains and pay more tax. They will also divulge more.

CBO guys flunked history.

Maybe we should save even more money. We could have the guy working from home triple up. Mornings, the weather. Afternoons, the budget. Evenings, coach our team.

Wait! Let’s really save money. What’s the number of the nursing home? Uncle Fred will do a lot for a Gino’s Special with anchovies.

Tom Morgan is a veteran columnist whose column appears weekly in the Observer-Dispatch. Contact him at tomasinmorgan@yahoo.com.

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